The changing roles, responsibilities and skills of subject and learning support librarians in universities in the Southern African Customs Union Region: guidelines for the establishment of a new service

Subject and learning support librarianship first began in African university libraries in the 1960s, but became more prevalent in the 1980s. Subject librarians, who were known by different titles in various universities, were responsible for one or more subjects, departments, schools or faculties, in terms of providing a subject-based information service, and performing subject-based collection development, user education, and liaison functions. They were organised according to specific models or structures which determined whether or not they performed only subject duties in the library. They formed a core part of the university library, and with each major technological advance, they had to reassess their roles, titles, functions, duties, educational qualifications and skills, so as to adapt to the new information environment. Unfortunately, the inception, development, re-assessment and adaptation of subject librarianship on the African continent did not follow a standard path, and no standards guidelines were compiled that could be utilised by new subject services. The purpose of this study was to investigate the roles, responsibilities and skills of subject librarians in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) region. The target population consisted of subject librarians in this region and a census method was used to determine participants. The quantitative research approach employing a survey design was used by the study. Data was collected using questionnaires, and results were clarified by interviews with a selection of library managers. Data was analysed using SPSS, MS-Excel and content analysis. The research found that the main models of subject librarianship in place were the dual and hybrid models. It determined the main titles that subject librarians were known by, and that their role, involved providing teaching, learning and research support to faculty members, staff, students and researchers. It also determined the main functions and related duties performed, and the main educational qualifications and skills held by, or required by subject librarians. Since the study found that no guidelines, specifically targeted at subject librarians in the region, were available, as one of its outcomes it provided guidelines, in the form of an appendix, for new subject services to adapt or adopt if they desired.Information ScienceD. Litt. et Phil. (Information Science

Distributed Selective Dissemination of Information

To help users cope with information overload, Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) will increasingly become an important tool in wide area information systems. In an SDI service, users post their long term queries, called profiles, at some SDI servers and continuously receive new, filtered documents. To scale up with the volume of information and the size of user population, we need a distributed SDI service with multiple servers. In this paper we first address the key problem of how to replicate and distribute profiles and documents among SDI servers. We draw a parallel between distributed SDI and the well-studied replica control problem, adapt quorum-based protocols for use in distributed SDI, and compare the performances of the different protocols. Next we address another important problem, that of efficient document delivery mechanisms. We present and evaluate a practical scheme, called profile grouping, which exploits the geographical locality of users to cut down network ..